Page 47

“Mom—”

“Sit. Both of you. I have tea, and I have questions, and I intend to get through all of both before anyone leaves this kitchen.”

Evelyn appeared in the doorway wiping her hands on a dish towel, sizing up Norden with the same measured thoroughness of someone who’d been reading people for longer than most people had been alive, dragon or otherwise. She gave nothing away — a single nod, like a verdict deferred rather than delivered, and turned back toward the kettle already singing on the stove.

“Sit,” she said again, gesturing at the kitchen table with the towel, and Norden sat, in the chair he’d pulled out directly beside Romily’s rather than across from it, close enough that his knee found hers under the table before either of them had said a word. Evelyn’s eyes tracked the movement with the interest of a woman tucking evidence away for later use, and said nothing about it yet, which Romily recognized as far more alarming than if she had.

The tea arrived in mismatched cups — one chipped, one with a hairline crack down the handle that had been holding for a decade out of sheer stubbornness, both of them the kind of imperfect objects that would never have been allowed anywhere near the executive suite four floors above the atrium. Norden accepted his without comment, not even glancing at the crack, and drank from it like it was the finest porcelain in the building he owned.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket several minutes into what could only be described as an interrogation with excellent manners.

JESSA: you’re at your MOM’S. with the DRAGON. this is the best day of my entire life and I’m not even the one who has to live it

She flipped the phone over without answering, because Evelyn was already pouring, and Evelyn’s interrogations required full attention or you missed the actual question buried inside the pleasant one.

“So.” Evelyn settled into her chair with the settled confidence of someone who’d never once lost an interview in her own kitchen. “Tell me about the hotel. The whole project, not the version in the papers.”

Norden told her. Real answers — the scope of it, the timeline, the way the atrium had changed since Romily’s installation started going up, delivered without a single word of the polish he’d have used in a boardroom. He wasn’t managing the room. He wasn’t performing warmth or credibility or anything else. He simply answered, the way he answered everything that mattered, and Romily watched her mother notice that immediately.

“That’s a very honest answer for a man who runs a company that size.”

“I don’t have much use for the other kind, not anymore.”

“Not anymore? Interesting phrasing.” Evelyn sipped her tea, eyes not moving off him. “What changed?”

He considered the question longer than most people gave her mother’s questions credit for deserving, turning his own cup a quarter turn on the saucer, a small unconscious tell Romily had learned to read across a hundred conversations that mattered to him more than he let on.

“I met someone who reads every room she walks into for the truth of it, structurally, whether the truth is convenient or not. It became difficult to keep offering her anything less.” He didn’t glance at Romily as he said it, didn’t perform the moment for her benefit, and the lack of performance made the answer land harder than if he had.

Evelyn’s eyebrows lifted a fraction of an inch. She set her cup down with the precise, deliberate care of a woman recalibrating a working theory in real time.

“Are you kind?”

The question landed in the kitchen with weight. Romily’s stomach did an entire structural collapse in real time, caught somewhere between wanting to intervene and knowing, with total certainty, that intervening would be the single worst thing she could do right now.

“I try to be.” Norden didn’t flinch from it, didn’t reach for a better answer, didn’t do a single thing to make the question smaller than her mother had intended it. “I’m not always successful.”

“Nobody who answers yes to that question has ever once been telling the truth.” Evelyn’s mouth curved, small and satisfied, the look of someone who’d gotten the answer she’d been fishing for and had known, before she asked, that she would. “The ones who say ‘I try’ are usually the only ones worth trusting with the job.”

A flicker crossed Evelyn’s expression. Romily watched it happen and tucked it away under things she hadn’t expected to witness today, somewhere alongside the cat’s continued indifference and the fact that her mother’s kitchen had apparently defeated centuries of composed executive presence without even trying.

“And are you good for her.” Evelyn’s voice hadn’t changed register at all, still pleasant, still warm, carrying as much weight as the first question. “Or just impressive. Those aren’t always the same thing, in my experience, and I’ve had no small amount of it.”

“I don’t know yet. I intend to find out, and I intend to be the kind of man who’s still finding out ten years from now, twenty years from now, if she’ll let me stay around long enough to keep trying.”

Romily’s tea had gone completely forgotten in her hands.

Evelyn studied him a long moment, the slow weighing of a mother who’d raised a daughter who built walls for a living and had watched, over the years, a parade of men either try to scale them or resent their existence. Norden did neither. He sat there, answering honestly, comfortable in a kitchen designed to expose the kind of performance he’d apparently decided not to give.

“Good answer,” Evelyn said finally, and reached for the teapot to refill his cup without asking, which Romily recognized, with real shock, as the single highest compliment her mother’s kitchen had to offer anyone.

He asked her mother a real question about the garden — not strategy dressed up as interest, not the calculated follow-up of a man working a room, but a genuine question about the roses climbing the back fence, the kind of thing you asked because you wanted the answer and not because the answer served a purpose.

Evelyn talked about soil pH and aphids and a rivalry with the neighbor’s climbing hydrangea that had been running for a decade, gesturing with her teacup like a conductor, and Norden listened to every word of it like the information mattered to him, which, Romily was beginning to suspect, it did.

He asked a follow-up about the aphids specifically. An actual follow-up, with a real question buried in it about companion planting, and Evelyn lit up like he’d handed her a gift she hadn’t expected anyone under the age of seventy to know enough to give.

“You know about ladybugs.”